Even as this is being written, Tentatively A. Convenience and his production
company, which consist of his girlfriend Dee-Dee, are filming at the volcano.
The work in progress is a videotape titled "Signs and Symptoms of Leptospirosis."

Now, if you want to see that as a listing on public television, you'd
expect a documentary about a bacteria carried by rodents and found in freshwater
pools and streams. And you'd be wrong. It is actually a videotape about
tourist monsters in Hawaii.

The roles are taken by Tentatively A. Convenience ("Call me Tent,"
he said, and we shall hereafter), his girlfriend and occasionally, two local
friends who would just as soon remain nameless. Their costumes for the production
are rubber Halloween face masks, monster gloves and footwear. That's it,
nothing else.

This requires a certain stealth in order not to be booked for indecent
exposure, but Tent seems to carrying it off. "We are very careful.
This is done in a guerrilla fashion. We don't rehearse, we just shoot,"
he said.

Earlier this week, he filmed a crucial scene at Sacred Falls, where the
leptospira are thought to be hanging out in droves.

"We told tourists who had hiked there that we were making a monster
movie, and I asked them to sit by the edge of the pool," Tent said,
"I went off behind the rocks, took off my clothes, put on my mask and
started creeping up on them behind the rocks.

"They never saw me, but it was a joke on the warning signs, 'Beware
Leptospirosis.' Nobody has any idea of what Leptospirosis is, but maybe
if you go swimming you'll get it and turn into a monster.

"Then you have to hang around the falls forever, hoping that some
other tourist will go swimming and turn into another monster and you'll
have some company."

What we have here is a suggestion of the plot and Tent's operating method
of filming. Another scene was shot from the beach to the little island in
the lagoon fronting the Hawaiian Village.

He swam out there, took off his suit and put on his mask, DeeDee filmed
him looking out from behind a tree. "It is very much a typical tourist
shot until you see the monster behind the tree. I am continually fooling
the audience," Tent said.

While he prefers not to explain things, letting his work speak for itself,
he did offer an explanation for calling himself Tentatively A. Convenience.
(It is not the name on his social security card or his passport.)

"It answers the question, 'What is your name?' on the level of what
function it serves. A name is tentatively a convenience. If you were telepathic,
or if there were just two people in the world, you wouldn't need a name."

Tent wears a zipper suit he said he made himself, although a year ago
he told a reporter for the Village Voice that it was made by "midget
undersea hermaphrodites."

The reporter put it into his story about the Neoist Movement, of which
Tent is a part, digging around in the cosmic search for meaning. Otherwise,
according to Village Voice, Tent makes videos of "vegetables having
sex and goofy people in monster masks."

The suit is simply about 100 zippers sewn together so he can take out
or drop off any part of it. To demonstrate, he took out the center section
of the top, which exposed "Haole" written in black electrician's
tape across his chest. The other three members of the company were similarly
marked.

The idea was that they would tan everywhere else, and "haole"
would be spelled out in lighter skin. But the sun didn't shine enough to
accomplish this. The whole thing was intended as a statement against the
colonization of Hawaii over the past 200 years, Tent said. "Haole is
a somewhat derogatory term," he added.

Tent has shaved his head, and has had a drawing of a brain tattooed in
red and green where the hair once was. He reached into a zippered pocket
for a pair of 3-D glasses, like those theaters issue to patrons of "Creature
from the Black Lagoon," which he passes to others so that they can
experience the full effect. "He always carries the glasses wherever
he goes," DeeDee mentioned in one of her few comments.

They don't really work, and the brain still looks like a tattoo, but
the idea is novel. Tent frequently wears a padded gray cap in the shape
of a human brain that he found in a Baltimore costume shop.

Baltimore is where Tent comes from and goes back to, but he didn't have
much more to offer about it than that.

He doesn't spend much time there because his films are made all over
the world. He showed a tape of a five-minute film he shot in 1984 during
a week in London, titled "Neoist Guide Dog." He was traveling,
he said, with a diabetic friend who is considered legally blind.

"When we were travelling together, I was her Seeing Eye dog. So
I decided to do something to exploit the situation, to take her blindness,
something depressing, and turn it into something positive and humorous."
Tent explained.

"I bought a dog mask, a harness and leash and I actually became
the dog."

Because blind people with Seeing Eye dogs ride free on London buses,
part of the improvisation was to see how the conductor would react. Tent
crawled on all fours up the steps of the bus, his leash in the hand of his
blind friend.

With true British stoicism, the conductor didn't bat an eye and walked
right past them. They only reaction came as they were boarding the bus,
from a real dog who barked at Tent in his German shepherd stance.

While all this doesn't add up to Steven Spielberg, it was funny. But
then Tent doesn't habe a Spielberg income, either. He works as a set designer
for industrial promotions, and recently turned a shopping mall into a setting
for "The Wizard of Oz."

"I give everything away as much as possible, and that helps create
a society that does the same thing for me. I get assistance from friends,
not just money but they lend me equipment, they put me up -- I stayed two
months with a friend in Scotland," Tent explained.

When he gets back to Baltimore, he intends to look up his tattoo artist.
"I have lots of scars on my body from all sorts of things. I intend
to tattoo pictograms next to each scar about what caused it.

"I got a cut on the arm carrying a talking tree for the 'Oz' set.
DeeDee and I were climbing Koko Crater and I got a big gash on my knee --
Ill have pictures of Koko Head and the tree."

So with the near future plotted, Tent had just one more question to answer.
Why does he do what he does? "Why? It's complicated.

"Whenever I find a rigid, non-fluid section of anything, where people
are forced into fixed roles, I like to subvert the situation so that roles
aren't so fixed. It is a convoluted, constantly changing message. Anything
can be anything. I have faith in the plasticity of reality."